Not canon compliant, truth be told plays somewhat fast and loose with canon after the end of the TV show, BTVS owned by Joss Whedon, Mutant Enemy and Dark Horse comics. This is a PeggySue. If you don't like time travel do overs, thank you for clicking through and giving it a try anyway.

Chapter 1

Faith used her left arm to lever herself into a sitting position wincing as ribs ground against each other.

She toggled her radio, "Overwatch, tangos are clear Foxtrot X-ray requesting immediate medical assist and transport." Getting no response, she tried again. "Overwatch, this is Foxtrot X-ray. Do you Copy?"

"Time to call for back up, Boy-Toy." She said taking stock. It wasn't good, they'd managed to kill the terrorists and the demon they were working with, but had taken a beating – and whatever had blown up at the end, had hit like a claymore – the explosive kind. Legs not working – broken ribs – she pressed her hand against her hip where something had hit below her body armor. Her pants were soaked in blood – not good.

Pulling a field dressing out of the pocket of her fatigue pants she pressed it to the wound shifting her belt to press over it, she tried to focus. "Xand? I'm not getting anybody on the radio you need to call in back up." Not getting a response she turned to her right as well as she could.

Xander lay a few feet away not moving. Faith scrabbled over to him cursing through clenched teeth she had at least a broken ankle if not worse in her legs. "Xander!" she checked him over as best she could, finding that he was breathing shallowly.

"Faith," he said his voice barely a whisper. She checked him for bleeders which there were more than she'd like to see.

"Come on Xan, Dawn will kill me if I don't bring you back in one piece," Faith said with a cough. She reached her hand into the pocket she knew held the satellite phone, hoping she could get a signal as deep in the canyon as they were. When her hand encountered sharp bits and wetness, she carefully pulled what turned out to be broken remnants of the phone.

"Sorry," Xander's thready voice said.

"Damn it," She'd been hurt enough times to know that even with Slayer healing she was in a bad way, her boot had a wet feeling when she moved and she was feeling light headed. Faith leaned over Xander to see if his radio was working better than hers. Several attempts later she stopped as Xander shuddered. She popped her emergency beacon that they had only as last resort since the local authorities would also pick it. Faith sighed in relief when the ELT started to beep and the strobe light flashed.

"Stay with me here Xander." She reached up and brushed his hair back with her increasingly less steady hand. Faith's mind wandered seeing that the tattoo on his left temple was bisected by a grazing cut, Faith wondered if it had still provided him with spider sense, as he used to call it, after the seed was destroyed. She hoped that their support team would come soon. She grasped his hand and thought about how she'd slept holding him the night before. He was so worried about Dawn's health, worried about the arguments he and Dawn had about having kids, but he had still agreed to help her on this job, a job she'd taken because although she had inherited Giles estate, it was still tied up in the courts and she needed to eat but didn't want to lean on the strained Slayer network. She shook her head to try to stay focused, she started to feel despair. She carefully leaned down and kissed his brow. "I'm sorry Xander, sorry I pulled you into this. I wish we could have done things different. I wish you could have had the family you needed."

"Granted."

Faith only had a moment to look up and see D'Hoffryn's face before everything faded to black.

"- I guess you'd say, What can make me feel this way? – My Girl, talkin' 'bout my girl" – Xander jerked awake from a brutal nightmare. He reached over and smacked the snooze button on the radio alarm blinking his eyes open. He tried to shake of nightmare and force his eyes to focus –Hunh, he thought, why would seeing out of both eyes feel wrong? Suddenly the dream he'd been having felt so much more real, He remembered Jessie's mom dropping him off last night after he Jessie and Willow had went to see Braveheart, but this morning it was like that was side by side with other memories, much longer memories.

"What the hell?" he asked rhetorically staring at the ceiling.

"Not hell, just the Hellmouth," said an amused voice in the corner. Xander's eyes snapped around as he threw himself out of the bed into a defensive stance – and almost ended up in a heap on the floor between his eyes feeding him information he wasn't used to and the instincts of a taller man telling his teenage body how to move. "Nice moves, defender of man." D'Hoffryn said chuckling.

"What do you want?" Xander asked, his fourteen-year-old self shaking inside as the adult Xander moved slowly towards the bat he knew was next to his desk.

"Peace, Alexander," The demon said holding his hands up. "I'm not real happy with how your world turned out, and not just for the diminished magic. So when a dying wish made by the last chosen Slayer was made with the life blood of the man who thwarted prophesy on her lips, I couldn't resist that much power." The demon waited until Xander stopped moving towards the bat. "I can't change everything without drawing too much notice, but you are the fulcrum upon which I brace my lever. I'm keeping the PTB from noticing this shift and I'll try to keep them from noticing you until much later. I'll also make you off limits to Anya." With a nod, the demon said "Good luck to you and your family," and he was gone.

Xander stood stunned, after a moment, he went and looked at himself in the mirror on the closet door. A skinny kid wearing the gym shorts that he slept in in the summer heat looked back at him. His memories told him it was the summer before freshman year, before he'd found out how bad the world really was, before he'd had to stake Jessie, before everything. He tried to center himself and unsurprisingly had difficulty as the sets of memories fought. Finally after several minutes he was able to quiet his mind. Was this real? It felt real and he

knew that D'Hoffryn could fold time or shift people to other dimensions or whatever. Hoping this wasn't the dimension where he ended up a vampire, he took stock of himself, just shy of fifteen, he was kind of gawky. He had an okay build, from swimming at Willow and Jessie's and biking or skateboarding pretty much everywhere, he was in good shape - for a fairly skinny kid. He took a deep breath – and thought his laundry basket was particularly ripe but he could also smell the scented candle in the bathroom and coffee downstairs, through the closed bedroom door. He tightened his fists, letting his mind flow, he could feel the hyena but thankfully it felt like it was in balance, something that he had only achieved towards the end of high school before. He'd have to pay attention though. He was startled out of his musings by the sound of the front door opening.

"Come in Rory," Xander heard his mom say.

"Morning Jessica," his uncle's voice replied.

"Did my idiot husband end up at your place last night?"

"Yeah, he wasn't real clear on what happened just that you were pissed at him and he needed to get out of the house." Uncle Rory said.

"Pissed, I almost shot that son of a bitch. I got a call from my cousin and came home to talk to Tony about it and I walked in to him banging Wendy Thompson – in our bed." His mom said with barely controlled rage. "That tramp ran out and I started chucking things at Tony, so yeah, I'm a little pissed if."

"I was worried it might be something like that. Dave, my buddy that Tony works for asked me if everything was okay last week – said that Tony was taking time off for 'Family' stuff. I hadn't had a chance to ask him about it."

"Family – Family! That no good son –" his mom's voice rose and then she stopped herself.

Xander remembered that his mom hadn't found out that his dad was cheating on her until the middle of his Junior year. By that point she was kind of beaten down about how her marriage had spiraled out of control. In this time, well dad had only gotten injured a little over two years ago so although things weren't great, his dad was working and seemed mostly to be in control.

"You tell him that I will be filing for divorce by the end of the day. This house was my grand parents', he doesn't have a claim to it, I'm not going to be unreasonable in what I ask for child support and alimony. I may want to bugger him with a cattle prod, but I won't beggar him. I want my private life to be my private life so I won't be real loud about details unless he gives me reason to. If he contests it, first thing I will do is make sure Wendy's husband knows what his wife has been doing, then I will hire someone to follow him and if he ever drives drunk again, the cops will get a tip and he'll end up in jail." His mom paused, "Can you make Tony understand that?"

He heard Rory let out a deep breath, "Yeah, Jessica, I'll make him understand that."

"Jessica."

"Yeah."

"I'm sorry," silence for almost a minute. "If you need any help with Xander or anything else, let me know."

"I will, and thanks Rory, I'm sorry to have yelled at you."

Xander heard the door open, he stood thinking about how this wasn't what he remembered.

"Alex, are you awake honey?" His mom said from outside the door.

"Yeah Mom." Xander said grabbing a shirt from the dresser. He pulled it on opening the door. There stood his mother looking much younger than the decade and change that separated her from the woman he had seen last summer, in his time.

"Alex -" she paused looking at him, "how much of your uncle and my conversation did you hear?"

Xander looked down for a moment, then looked her in the eye. "Pretty much all of it, I'm sorry Mom," Xander said. Anything further was cut off by his mom wrapping her arms around him.

"No Honey, I'm sorry. I've decided our marriage can't go on, but that doesn't change the fact that he is your father."

Xander tried to suppress his thoughts about his father and how the man would act for the next 10 years.

"I wanted to tell you differently, but I guess we can't change that." Gathering herself and stepping back, her hands still on Xander's shoulders. "This is the biggest change, but there's other things I need to talk to you about." She looked at her watch. "Unfortunately, I have to go take care of some business. I need your help while I'm gone, can you please box up the stuff in the guest room dresser and closet and move it down to the basement?"

Xander looked at his mother.

"We are more than likely having one of my relatives come stay with us for a while. I will tell you about it tonight."

After his mom left Xander showered and grabbed breakfast. Pondering how things changed, lost in thought, Xander started cleaning the kitchen quickly and efficiently not realizing what he was doing until he was halfway through loading the dishwasher. He stopped for a moment and hoped that Mom would assume his change of habits was due to the upheaval in the house.

Thinking of how much his room smelled like a locker room, he quickly started his laundry and then went to the garage to grab some boxes. He started by boxing up the odds and ends in the dresser. He was carrying the last load of stuff down as he heard the washer buzz. Switching his laundry around, he moved on to doing general pick up.

By lunch time, he was folding the last of his laundry as sheets and towels thunked around in the washer, the house was in almost as good a shape as the day before Christmas, right before relatives arrived.

He was putting away dishes when he heard the front door open and his mom gasp.

"Alex," her voice queried loudly.

"In here Mom," he called out.

He heard her go upstairs, heard the toilet flush and then come back down slowly making her way to the kitchen.

When she came through the doorway, he could see her eyes glistening.

"Honey you didn't have to do all this, it's not your fault." His mom said coming towards him and wrapping her arms around him.

Xander was glad that his mom assumed his change of behavior was due to the impending divorce. An easy fiction came to his mind, "I just wanted the house to look nice for whoever the house guest is, so you could feel good about having them here."

His mom looked him in the eye, he could tell she didn't believe him but she didn't push the issue. "Thank you Alex."

His mother made a quick lunch, while she ate she explained that the next couple of weeks were going to be crazy so she wanted to take him shopping for some clothes and things.

The afternoon was spent shopping, his mom didn't even flinch when he asked if he could get some boots from the surplus store and when he said he liked the field jackets she wordlessly took the black one he'd been holding and put it with the stack of things he bought. She next pulled in to the Sportmart lot and Xander assumed it was for new trainers – tennis shoes he mentally corrected himself Hanging out with too many Brits, after they got him a new pair of Reeboks and a new backpack book bag, a nicer one than he remembered getting in his older memories, she lead him over to the cycling section

"I know it's a few weeks early, but you've been hinting that you wanted a mountain bike for your birthday." His mom said looking at him, "I'm not trying to bribe you, but I don't want to have at least this part of your birthday get screwed up in the shuffle." His mom looked at him

It was as they were leaving that Xander noticed Mom was using his father's credit card to pay and come to think of it, had all day. She did insist that he get a helmet and gloves, Xander guessed she had seen too many head injuries at work.

After picking up groceries, they headed back to the house. Rory was sitting on the front porch drinking a soda and smoking.

"Evening Jessica,"

"What are you doing here Rory?" his mom asked.

"Tony's at my place, I went and saw him on his lunch break and told him after the shit – after what happened, there needed to be somebody here other than you and Xander when he came to get stuff –sorry kid-" he said to Xander. "When you're ready for him to come over I'll call him."

Xander's mom nodded, "Help us carry this stuff in?"

"Sure."

With Rory's help they quickly got everything into the house and all of Xander's stuff including the bike upstairs in his room.

"Xander, do you want to see if you can go over to Willow or Jesses', it might be easier if you weren't here for this."

Xander winced trying to think which would be more difficult seeing Willow who he had been upset with about Dawn, or Jessie whose last memory was staking him. "Yeah that's probably a good idea." Xander remembered that Willow's parents were out of town for the next couple of days. This was the first summer that they started leaving her alone like this and Xander remembered watching them be more and more absent.

"Hey Willow, can I come hang out?" Xander asked after the obligatory greetings.

"Sure Xander," his oldest friend replied. "If you want to bring your suit, we can swim until sundown, Do you want to stay for dinner?."

"Sounds good." Xander held the phone away from his face. "Mom, Willow wants to know if I want to come over and stay for dinner. Can I go?"

"Thank you," was the reply. "Your uncle or I will pick you up around eight."

"Mom said it's okay, I'll see you in like ten minutes Willow, thanks."

Xander ran upstairs and threw his swim trunks in his new back pack.

A few minutes later, he was skating the three blocks to Willow's.

Once he'd mentioned the divorce, Willow seemed to believe that any oddities in his reactions were due to what was going on at his house. He found that he was able to ignore the actions of future Willow and mostly interact with her as just a teenager. This probably meant he came off as distracted and broody, which would make Willow worry about him, but well fourteen year old Xander was king of broody.

Uncle Rory dropped him off that evening, opening the door, he could smell cookies baking. Mom didn't bake very often so she must be trying to comfort him. He hung his bag next to the stairs and walked into the kitchen. Mom was just plating up some cookies and sat at the table with him.

They sat in silence for a while, finally his mom looked him in the eye, "Big day."

"Yeah."

"This could have gone better."

"I guess."

"Alex, this is going to change everything, but your dad and I will be there for you. So will your uncle Rory."

"Thanks Mom," Xander said taking a cookie.

"Alex," his mom said gathering herself, "there's something else. The reason I came home early yesterday is I got a call from my cousin Charlie."

Xander didn't remember a cousin Charlie.

"I haven't spoken to her for years, but she is in some trouble and needs help. Her daughter needs a place to stay because Charlie can't take care of her." His mom took a sip of coffee. "I came home to talk to your dad and planned to talk to you, because this isn't for a couple weeks, more than likely it will be for a couple years or permanently."

Now Xander was really curious. What else had D'Hofryn changed

"I talked to an attorney and a social worker I know at the hospital and everything is set up, so Sunday we will be picking up your cousin Faith at the airport."

Xander sat stunned, now I know the world is just fucking with me.

"Xander, Honey, I know none of this is easy. But she needs our help, her Mom is in some trouble with the law and if I don't take her in, she will go into foster care which her mom doesn't want because she thinks it will make it harder to get back into Faith's life."

Xander put on a small smile, "It's okay mom, we need to help out where we can for family."

"Thank you Alex, I know it's just so much to deal with."

"Mom, can we go to mass tomorrow night?" In this time, Xander remembered, that they hadn't attended church very often, mostly because although Catholic, Tony had been lapsed and anti established religion..

His mom cupped his cheek, "Yes Alex, that would be nice."

Four A.M. found Xander sitting up in bed staring out his window, dead friends had haunted his sleep – images of Willow with black eyes – of Dawn weak and drawn after the seed of magic was destroyed. Giving up on sleep, Xander quietly made his way down to the basement and grabbed a jump rope to try to lose himself in exercise. When he started doing push ups and pull ups, he was surprised at how many he could do. He definitely came back stronger than he'd been at this age. As the sun rose, Xander stepped out the back door his Walkman in hand and walked out to the garage. Once he'd made sure that the garage didn't hide any nasties – habits ingrained from too many years of living on edge – Xander put on his headphones and hit play, The opening sounds of the crowd chanting and clapping, the bag pipes quieting the crowd, "Oh Please talk to Me! Won't you Please come talk to me, Just like it used to be, Come on Come talk to me, Come talk to meee!," The drums thudding into his soul Xander sat in the sun and cried as Peter Gabriel sang about the love and chance at a happy life crumbling around him. Xander sat and listened to the tape, wishing for his ipod, wishing he could thumb past the upbeat Steam, He wasn't ready for that yet, he rewound the tape restarting the song. He sat for several minutes

"Goodbye Morning Star, I hope I'll see you again."

Ever since Jesse had let him copy it on to a tape Xander had loved this album and this song in particular. Shaking himself he got up, some of the older broken tools had handles that could easily become stakes. Sitting in the rising sun, Xander worked on his first two stakes. Putting his finished stakes up on a shelf, Xander took the old push mower and started mowing the back lawn.

He was just flipping over the ninety minute tape when his mom came out the back door. He dropped the headphones into his collar stopping the tape.

"Alex, Honey, you didn't need to do this, this early." She said looking concerned.

Xander shrugged, "Couldn't sleep."

His mom cupped his cheek, "I'm sorry Dear."

"I's okay, just wanted to keep busy."

"I understand, I'll go get breakfast started, come in when you are done with the yard." His mom turned back to the house. "It looks good Alex, thank you."

Author's note: yes I know the idea of getting Faith assigned to Jessica's custody that quickly or even at all with the divorce is just unbelievable, but well, magic.